It’s been a while since I last posted anything, but lately I’ve been hearing that the sky is falling. Most notably by the corporation for whom I work declining COLA (cost of living allowance) raises, promotions, etc. despite reporting record profits. So I did a little digging.

The recession started at the beginning of Q4 2008 and ended at the beginning of Q3 2009. The GDP declined a total of 16.97% during that period; but here’s the good news, since then, the GDP has rebounded to being only 5.91% below where it started out. Meaning that the economy has recovered 88.25% of what it lost. While that’s good, it’s not great ’cause during the same length of time the economy has not fully recovered. But here’s the good news. Things are looking up! Woohoo!

There’s only one thing I hate more than being wrong…and that’s admitting being wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released the latest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) findings, confirming what all the doomsayers have been saying for the past nine months. The 4th Quarter GDP findings for 2008 is that the GDP decreased (was down) 5.8 points AND the 1st Quarter GDP findings for 2009 is that the GDP was down 3.5 points. Thus, by definition, the GDP being down for two or more consecutive quarters, indicates a recession. This is the first recession in U.S.  history in 51 years (1957Q4 to 1958Q1) .

Generally, there are two trains of thought regarding under which president what economic boost/recession occurs so, here they are: Republicans believe that what they do while in office affects the future economy; thus, republicans explain away any bad economic terribleness that occurs during their term and take credit for anything good afterwards. While Democrats believe that what they do in office affects the present economy, thus taking credit for anything good during and ignoring anything bad before and after. However, I am of a third, what happened in the past influences the future, but only for the number of years a president is in office in quarters after he leaves office, e.i, President Franklin Roosevelt served 12 years, thus, he’s responsible for 12 quarters after his exodus from office .

Here’s what that breaks down to, from 1953-today, the best economic presidents in order are:

1.     President Jimmy Carter (D) >> 186.8
2.     President Ronald Reagan (R) >> 126
3.     President Gerald Ford (R) >> 116.6
4.     President Lyndon Johnson (D) >> 102
5.     President Dwight Eisenhower (R) >> 88.4
6.     President Richard Nixon (R) >> 88.3
7.      President Bill Clinton (D) >> 78.4
8.     President George H. W. Bush (R) >> 78
9.     President George W. Bush (R) >> 62.1
10.   President John Kennedy (D) >> 27.1

Now, an argument might be made that it’s not fair that Kennedy is last since he was assassinated; based upon my assumption, he only affected four quarters. Yet, that argument is valid still! So, dropping him from the list, President George W. Bush is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER, at least economically (I’m not going into the political, social, and moral crap, ’cause all that’s subjective), and still, there’s 7 quarters that we’ve yet to consider so if the economy keeps going craptastic, thank President Bush.

Historically, Republicans had the most positive influence nearly doubling that of Democrats but there’ve been 50% more of ‘em too, so normalizing for that, Republicans only performed 10% better, or 2% better per president, but then, Carter nearly 50% better than the next best…a Republican.

Anyway, all of this is to say…recessions suck…and I hate being wrong…you’d think by being married I’d be used it by now, eh?

So, this is for all you tree-hugging, crunchy, big government loving hippies.

Medicare, you know that terrible program that I pay for that I will never use and is used to pay the bills of people who think they have a right to my money since they don’t take responsibility for themselves,  is paying to buy guns for old people. Click here to find out more.

Well the Bureau of Economic Analysis released the new Third Quarter Gross Domestic Product information. The result: the GDP was UP yet again by 3.6% compared to being UP 4.1% and UP 3.5% the previous two quarters. The net result? WE’RE STILL NOT IN A RECESSION!

Ok, all of you Chicken Little’s out there with your sky falling. Let me get one thing straight. THERE IS NO RECESSION! Yeah, you read right. NO RECESSION! How do I figure? Well, a recession is a mathematical fact defined by a decrease of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more consecutive quarters, (read: six or more months). Guess what? According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. hasn’t had a recession since 1982, that’s right, 1990Q4 and 1991Q1 were two consecutive quarters where the GDP was down. Accordingly, the GDP has been up every quarter since G.W. took office, except 2007Q4 and the quarter he took office, and then, it was only down 0.04% and 0.12%, respectively. Now, there are indications that we might be leading into the start of a recession, but that won’t be finalized until the end of this month and even then, preliminary reports show that the GDP will actually be up again this quarter. So the FACT IS: WE’RE NOT IN A RECESSION!

Well, today is my first day at work. All I have to say is, “The Shaw Group is freakin’ awesome!” More updates later.

So I finally got a “real” job, not that working at Wal-Mart and FedEx wasn’t real, it’s just that I’m educated as an electrical engineer and I’m not exactly doing that there.

Well, I’ve made a list of the languages I’d like to learn. The list encompasses approximately 40% of the world’s spoken languages (based on population), it’d be higher, but I am all ready quite fluent, though my wife would likely argue a counterpoint, in the world’s third largest spoken language: English. The list in order of population who speak it:

Chinese (Mandarin)
Spanish (Spain)
Bengali (Bangladesh)
Hindi (India)
Portugese
Russian
Arabic (Egypt, you’d be surprised how many dialects there are.)
Japanese
German
French

Those 10 languages account for approximately 2.74B of the world’s 6.66B people, so, if I’m able to successfully butcher the languages much like our international friends butcher English, I’ll be well on my way to being

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been responding back and forth with NCSoft’s customer support for a game called Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa. Under the advise of my wife, I’ve decided to let it go, since, even though I am in the right, the customer support team just continues to parrot the “research” someone supposedly did, but in the interest of time, actually did not do. It’s quite aggravating but I am quite familiar with how customer support works. After the first couple times of submitting responses, I was probably *flagged* as a “problem customer” since I’m not dumb enough to actually believe any of the crap they spew at me. Their last response it what really cracks me up. “No record of a character named ‘Kridler’ for any…account.” REALLY? NO KIDDING! All of the beta characters were deleted from the accounts after the end of the beta prior to the game’s live release; of course there’s no “Kridler” for an active account, it was deleted! I’m starting to think that they’re only looking on the servers that I have an active character, and not the beta logs. I’m really looking forward to getting screwed out of the 10 black armor dyes I’m supposed to get for playing on the public test server for two consecutive hours, especially since I played one character for about 12-13 hours in multiple hour segments. Anyhoo, here’s the “support”:

The other day, my mother called me with a message that my grandmother wants to “secure the future of her great-grandchildren” with an “investment” in gold. I called my mom back and told her that was a terrible investment. Here’s why: since 1833, gold has had the incredible interest rate of 1.97% per year while the consumer price index, aka, “inflation” increased at a rate of 3.29% per year, since 1913. But that’s not such fair comparison, so how about comparing gold and CPI since 1975. That comes out to be 4.35% and 4.35% for inflation and gold, respectively. Good investment? I think not! Gold’s barely kept up with inflation. Something that I consider an investment performs better than inflation *after* taxes.